The Mail

Letters from our readers.

How to Do Good

Larissa MacFarquhar’s article about Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation (“What Money Can Buy,” January 4th) highlights the institution’s recent focus on remedying income inequality. Until the advent of the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation was the single largest and most influential private source of philanthropy in the United States, and possibly in the world. As MacFarquhar notes, the foundation has a history of creating change in areas where governments are often ineffectual. One example is in the arts—in particular, the realm of orchestral music. In the early nineteen-sixties, before the United States had a national-arts bureaucracy, the Ford Foundation’s arts-and-humanities program not only supported bright young composers like Philip Glass and Peter Schickele but also professionalized and developed American symphony orchestras. The foundation’s program for symphony orchestras, established through an eighty-million-dollar gift, raised the standard of living for members of American ensembles, bestowed orchestras with permanent endowments, and forced them to develop robust new fund-raising mechanisms. This contribution by the Ford Foundation made orchestral music a viable career for many young musicians, dwarfing the 1966 budget of the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts, which was less than three million dollars. As with the arts in the sixties, income inequality today is an issue that individuals and institutions in the United States and abroad have struggled to improve. There’s reason to be optimistic that the Ford Foundation will be able to create change where others have failed.

Ben Negley

San Jose, Calif.

In her informative article, MacFarquhar discusses what large foundations like the Ford do with the money they spend. It’s crucial that all such foundations also be held accountable for how the substantial resources under their control are invested. Money invested in very profitable but socially harmful industries—oil, tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, for example—can undo the good accomplished by the money earned from those investments.

Sudhir Jain

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Temperance vs. Prohibition

Kelefa Sanneh’s article on Lisa McGirr’s new history of Prohibition, “The War on Alcohol” (“Drunk with Power,” December 21st & 28th), raises interesting questions about the relationship between federal action and behavioral reform. However, there is an important distinction between the temperance movement and the efforts to secure legal Prohibition. These very different social and political groups were merged in the historical consciousness only after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, when anyone who was anti-alcohol was considered a proponent of a repressive and intrusive government. Temperance had a broader reach than Prohibition, and many advocates of temperance opposed Prohibition, viewing alcohol consumption not as an individual failure of will or of morality but as a symptom of inequality and of social and political corruption. Many Socialists and trade unionists advocated temperance because alcoholism interfered with workers’ efforts at social change. If we are going to compare the problems associated with alcohol, and its prohibition, with current debates about drug laws, we should recognize that our options are not only laissez-faire decriminalization or authoritarian intrusiveness. Social transformations can ameliorate the crises of poverty and racism, lessening the need for self-medication on the part of the poor and removing the justifications that have led to a crisis of mass, racialized incarceration.

Paul C. Mishler

South Bend, Ind.

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The agent’s dismissal gives the appearance that the agency buckled under political pressure, and sets a highly disturbing precedent.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.